Behind the Plain Lives of Two Farmers, a Past That's Anything But

MILLBURN, N.J., March 6 - Stage actors who find fame on television often encounter turbulence when negotiating a return to the boards, but the transition seems to have been effortless for John Mahoney.

Mr. Mahoney won a Tony Award for John Guare's "House of Blue Leaves" back in 1986, and subsequently groused his way into television history as the chronically exasperated father of those two neurotic psychiatrists on "Frasier."

In that unusually stylish sitcom, Mr. Mahoney displayed a mastery of understatement that serves him equally well in "The Drawer Boy," a restrained Canadian drama by Michael Healey about the complex ties that bind a pair of World War II veterans. Mr. Mahoney appeared in previous productions of the play at his former home base, the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, and at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, and has now taken it to the Paper Mill Playhouse here.

The play is set in 1972 on a farm in Ontario, where the hard but placid workaday life of Morgan (Mr. Mahoney) and Angus (Paul Vincent O'Connor) is interrupted one morning when an unusual visitor comes to call. An eager-eyed young actor, Miles (Louis Cancelmi), is researching a theater piece about farming, to be put on by his Toronto-based theater collective, and he wants to observe Morgan and Angus on their daily rounds.

The citified young man is allowed to stick around, but he is soon rubbing Morgan the wrong way, inspiring him to make sport of Miles's naïveté.

"So for 30 years you've been doing this," Miles says, embarking on the intense homework of an idealistic actor. "Planting, nurturing, nourishing, building up; then harvesting, reaping, destroying, eviscerating."

"How does that make you feel?" he asks earnestly.

In the uninflected but unmistakably derisive tone that Mr. Mahoney all but trademarked as Martin Crane on "Frasier," Morgan replies, "Miles, it's an emotional roller coaster."

Despite Morgan's stonewalling tone, the three characters in "The Drawer Boy" will, in fact, begin a journey through emotional peaks and valleys as the knotty history of the relationship between Morgan and Angus is gradually brought to light.

As Miles begins poking around the dusty corners of these plain-spoken old fellows' hearts and minds, he learns that Morgan and Angus have lived together on the farm ever since they returned from their youthful stints as enlisted men. Angus still bears the mental scars of a brain injury he suffered during a bombing in London. His memory is all but wiped out, and while he can still make sandwiches (and do sums spectacularly), he can't remember, for example, who Miles is, so the young man must reintroduce himself every time they meet.

Mr. O'Connor's performance is refreshingly crisp and unsentimental, and he and the director, Anna D. Shapiro, avoid excessively exploiting the character's affliction for either its maudlin or comic potential. The rapport between Angus and Morgan is the emotional core of the play, and Mr. Mahoney and Mr. O'Connor imbue it with a gruff tenderness that gradually takes on darker and more complex colors as disturbing flashes of recollection begin igniting in Angus's clouded consciousness.

These buried memories are jarred, somewhat arbitrarily, by Miles's decision to use the story of Morgan and Angus's history together in his play: he had overheard Morgan recounting to Angus the tale of their love for two young Englishwomen and its sad denouement. Using the comforting cadences of an oft-repeated bedtime story, Morgan also speaks of Angus's youthful love for drawing, referring to him as "the drawer" and himself as "the farmer."

Morgan is incensed when they watch a rehearsal of the play, but seeing the story recounted by Miles seems to have restarted long-stalled circuits in Angus's brain. Trouble brews, however, when the images from the past flooding Angus's mind don't always jibe with the version of their lives that Morgan feeds him.

Mr. Healey's dialogue, natural and unadorned, is complemented by a handsomely plain physical production featuring a sturdy farmhouse set by Todd Rosenthal and warm prairie lighting by Kevin Adams. But hoary conventions do keep poking through the homespun texture of the writing. The role of Miles is essentially a device. The dramatic climax is a stagy dredging up of long-buried secrets. And Angus's mental capacities fluctuate a bit conveniently with the narrative necessities of the play.

But Mr. Healey doesn't indulge in the kind of emotional manipulation that this synthetic dramaturgy generally guarantees. And Ms. Shapiro's sensitive production keeps the evening's tenor clean and subdued. Paradoxically, "The Drawer Boy" is affecting precisely because it refuses to squeeze all the sentimental possibilities from the bittersweet history it describes.